Hedonists?  Though I don’t like its name, L’Hedoniste, because I find it smug (per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, hedonism is the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life), I would still heartily recommend this friendly, lively and very good-looking bistro on the northern edge of Les Halles.

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NOTE, September 8, 2014: Chef Philippe L’Abbe is no longer cooking at L’Abeille, so this review remains posted only for reference on this dining room. When a new chef is announced and tried, a new review will follow.

Since it was announced as the newest ‘haute cuisine’ restaurant in Paris, I found myself vaguely wondering what this term actually means these days as Bruno and I drove over to the new Paris Shangri-La hotel for dinner at the just opened L’Abeille restaurant last Friday night. Technically, ‘haute cuisine’ means the highest or finest level of cooking on the French food chain, but since such classifications have been rather wonderfully muddled during the last twenty years, with many haute cuisine chefs like Alain Passard embracing an almost Zen-like simplicity and young bistro chefs like Cyril Aveline at Les Bistronomes engineering an amazing technicity into the bistro register.

Arriving, all of the conventions of haute cuisine were very much in place, including highly formatted service and beautifully dressed tables in a very politely decorated dining room which conveyed the message that a serious meal–both in terms of price and the quality of the cooking, was imminent. The name of the restaurant offered another cue, too, since the ‘abeille’ (bee) is the emblem of the Napoleon family, and Shangri-La has made much of the fact that this grand 1896 mansion was once the home of Prince Roland Bonaparte, Napoleon’s grand-nephew.

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On a sunny Saturday morning in New York City, I found myself poking around in the wonderful Union Square market with two recurring thoughts in my mind–1) I wish we had a market this profoundly local in Paris, and 2) The transformation of this formerly down-and-out patch of urban turf really is a miracle. When I first moved in with Tom on 16th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the early 1980s, he expressly forbad me to walk through Union Square, which was then the venue of a pretty fierce crew of drug dealers and users. I ignored his warning during the day, but did walk around the edge of the park at night, because there was no doubt it was dangerous. And now it’s one of the busiest, liveliest and most attractive parks in New York City, which never ceases to amaze me.

For that matter, almost all of the formerly dodgy bits of Manhattan have been spruced up and sociologically scoured by the great flood of Wall Street money that washed over the island during the last twenty years, and if I certainly don’t miss the constant vigilance that was once part of walking New York’s streets or the city’s once filthy, graffiti covered, non-air-conditioned subways, there are times when I feel a twinge of nostalgia for the bohemian funkiness and artistic edginess that’s been dulled by a pervasive corporate prosperity. Walking through Chelsea to meet a friend for dinner the other night, I came across the shuttered premises of the old Empire Diner and it set off a mental slide show of fuzzy images from madcap middle-of-the-night meals surrounded by a wonderfully oddball quorum of transvestite prostitutes, drug-muddled club goers, sozzled artists, and the miscellaneous eccentrics who were once numerous in Manhattan, including an old woman with a heavy Slavic accent who’d come by around 3am in a tattered ball gown with troweled on makeup and a parrot on her shoulder.

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In the days that I was an editorial assistant tucked away in a niche in front of an IBM Selectric type writer and regularly making restaurant reservations for a brilliant editor at Random House, I acquired an intimate knowledge of what powerful New York media people liked to eat. And in the 1980s in New York City, France stilled ruled the roost, since my editor, a wonderful man from the Philadelphia Main Line (that string of affluent suburbs west of the city of Brotherly Love), regularly asked me for a table at Le Veau d’Or, La Caravelle, and a whole litany of other expensive French restaurants on the East Side.

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Dining room at Kei  Heading off to dinner at Kei, the new restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Gerard Besson, I couldn’t help but think of several memorable meals I’d previously had at this address. Among several, one immediately came to mind, a lunch with the editor-in-chief of a big London paper who seemed impatient to get through the meal and claim the post-prandial prize of a big snifter of Armagnac. He was ostensibly in town to check in with the Paris offices of his paper, and I was surprised when he called and invited me, a lowly free-lancer, out for a sumptuous lunch.

We hadn’t met before, but I wasn’t surprised to find a florid, leonine man sitting at the table I was ushered to. We chatted about the bistro story I had recently done for him, he made several inevitable remarks about how it was surprisingly literate for a piece penned by an American, and then ordered a feast of game in halting school-boy French that surely left a good swath of Loire Valley forest in a decimated quietude with a superb bottle of Burgundy. If the conversation required constant nursing, the meal–a tourte de gibier and roast pheasant, was absolutely superb, so good, in fact, that I found myself drifting off into a haze of pleasure once or twice during his diatribe about the first President Bush. Then we finally arrived at the moment when the solemn waiter placed a snifter in front of him and filled it with Armagnac. Rather alarmingly, he gulped it down in a flash and signaled for another pour. Midway into this second glass, he suddenly got teary and told me his wife had asked him for a divorce because she’d taken up with the carpenter who was doing work on their country house. In vengeance, he’d gone to a maison des filles the night before, and had had some difficulties performing with an Eastern Bloc temptress.

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The Ta Family @ Bob Peterson

It was a hot August afternoon the first year that I lived in Paris, and a Sunday to boot, which meant back in that much more idle time in my life, I’d spent most of the day lying on my bed reading a novel so brilliant, “The Locusts Have No King” by Dawn Powell, I hadn’t even had lunch. Suddenly it was 6pm, and I was still wearing a bath robe and sipping the same pot of cold tea I’d made that morning. In this little corner of Paris, I wasn’t the only one having a lazy day–I could see my neighbor Francoise Ménard, a brilliant painter (why, oh, why didn’t I buy one of her beautiful paintings?), taking a timeout from her easel with a cigarette and a glass of white wine in the open window of her apartment next door and over the tall ivy-covered wall that was meant to protect the neighboring convent from prying eyes, a nun with a tent of aluminum foil cooking the hair dye on her head was watching television. The clock ticked, and the heat of the day was starting to break. I had to get up and get dressed, but this book was so good, I hated the idea of going out for dinner. If it hadn’t been for the fact the meal I was going to with my friend Rise also included her visiting mother, I probably would have called her and begged off.

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